13 January 2012 2:25 PM

Frankly they don’t give a damn. When will the Government commit to a proper drugs prevention policy?

Even more shocking than last week’s statistic, brought to light by the Daily Mail, that over 12,000 children under 16 were arrested for drugs offences last year, was the Government’s casual response.

Drug use is dropping, it came. "Our goal is to prevent young people from taking drugs by using early intervention programmes and services like FRANK to ensure they have the support and information to make the right choices".

How very reassuring. Not.

It may be true that overall drug use is dropping among schoolchildren - among those not truanting but attending those schools who agree to be part of the national survey (increasing numbers of schools refuse to be sampled). But given rising truancy, the ever lower ‘age of initiation’ to all drugs, and rising teen cocaine use, this is hardly time for complacency.

And just what is FRANK that we (parents, teachers and the public) are invited to place our reliance in to ensure children make ‘informed choices’ to take or not to take drugs as they please?

It’s the Government’s nine-year-old drug education programme. Its aim? Well, it was never to try and prevent schoolchildren’s drug use only to reduce it, through "targeted" and "accurate” information, advertised and promoted through television, radio and the internet. In fact they way it was constructed in 2003 you’d be forgiven for believing that drug taking was a legally sanctioned teen activity.

Several million pounds later (£5 million a year to run this outfit over and above staff costs) despite severe criticism of its drugs normalising approach, its blatant scientific inaccuracies, its irresponsible helpline, despite a nominal policy shift to prevention, the Coalition decided to relaunch FRANK as its national drugs education policy centrepiece.

Enter the website and you are confronted with an asinine display, questionable information and advice about drugs and their risks (and, mind you, their pleasures too) and a phone helpline.

You couldn’t make the inanity up if you tried. Posters like, “Is Skunk stronger than Badger”, “Does Meow Meow have whiskers?” are there to be downloaded. Defying any possible advertising logic, these have zero negative charge and fail totally as puns. In fact you begin to seriously wonder about the IQ levels of Home Office civil servants. “They are just so wrong in every sense”, commented my bemused 23 year old son, “the strange and limited impact these have is only to promote the drug: free drug name branding.”

So instead of leading that war on drugs we are constantly told has failed, we find our woolly minded Home Office civil servants obsessed with getting online, on message and in touch, inviting schoolchildren to ‘Talk to Frank’ about the highs, the lows and everything in between’.

But talking to Frank, as the Sunday Telegraph exposed, has proved, well, frankly, dangerous. Reporters, posing as children calling the Government's druggy helpline were told that cannabis is safer than alcohol and that ecstasy would not damage their health.

The conclusion of a non-drug using 20 year old I asked to go through the relaunched site for me page by page (as an alternative reference point to me) was that it left him thinking that drug taking could be (more than he had thought before) a rational or justifiable decision.

It’s ‘Your Say’ stories, he said, made drug use out to be safe and positive, “I loved being stoned – putting the bad times aside, the good ones greatly overshadow them”. Only with addiction and dependent use, he said, did he get the message from FRANK that drug use could become unsafe.

A bit late for the parent of an irreversibly cannabis-damaged psychotic teen.

Despite a comprehensive and fully researched critique of the site’s inaccuracies and omissions delivered to the Home Office by biology teacher and the country’s lead drugs prevention campaigner, Mary Brett, the (normalising) ethos that most children take drugs (they don’t) and are OK persists on the FRANK website. So too do dangerous scientific inaccuracies.

“I was bitterly disappointed when I read the new re-vamped FRANK website, she wrote to the Government, “in some respects it is even worse than the old version, and certainly not in line with the Government's policy of prevention.”

Just one example is where “FRANK” tells us that THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the active chemical in cannabis) stays in the body for 2-7 days, in regular users for up to a month. Not so. Whether for a regular or occasional user, 50% of THC will be there a week later and 10% after a month. These facts are not unimportant for a child (or his parent) who want to avoid his school expulsion, or for a driver, to know.

In fact FRANK’s sheer carelessness is mind boggling. In its Magic Mushrooms advice section (it states helpfully that people use between one and five grams) they include the very, very poisonous FLY AGARIC (Amanita muscaria) - the familiar toadstool of children’s picture books. It is not a magic mushroom. The harm reduction advice given therefore that people do not usually it eat raw (highly toxic cooked too) is hardly adequate…. Other drug websites have, unfortunately, copied this official information.

Although a few of Mary Brett’s scientific corrections – the effect of cannabis on the brain and academic performance, the 16 times increased risk of driving with alcohol and cannabis together than with either drug alone - have been added, the site and the helpline still minimise risks and effects.

But what beggars belief is that while this under par ‘Which’ consumer service on drug ‘highs and lows’ is pumped out, the Government dismisses robust prevention programmes as having no ‘evidence’ to justify them before they have even tried any.

Yet individual schools have demonstrated the efficacy of sniffer dogs and drugs testing. Yet both Sweden and the United States have now, for several years, run remarkably effective police-led, school-driven prevention and intervention programmes, and witnessed far more dramatic drops in teen drug use than here. The government’s senior drug advisors however have insisted that there is no ‘evidence’ to justify trying them here.

Unless the Government does act and stop this namby pamby, ill conceived approach to respecting teen choice and start to say no, we can expect the number of kids arrested for possessing and dealing drugs to go up again next year.

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